John Cooper
(around 1732) U.K.
Drag queen
John Cooper (also known as "Princess Seraphina") prosecuted Tom Gordon for stealing his clothes. (NB: Cooper/Seraphina was not the person on trial: he was the accuser.) Princess Seraphina was a gentleman's servant, and a kind of messenger for mollies (gay men), and a bit of a hustler.
More to the point, she was the first recognizable drag queen in English history, that is the first gay man for whom dragging it up was an integral part of his identity, and who was well known by all his neighbours as a drag queen or transvestite "princess": everyone called him Princess Seraphina even when he was not wearing women's clothes. And he does not seem to have had any enemies except for his cousin, a distiller who thought that his behaviour was scandalous.
Thomas Gordon was indicted for assaulting John Cooper in a Field in Chelsea Parish, putting him in fear, and taking from him a Coat, a Waistcoat, a pair of Breeches, a pair of Shoes, a pair of Silver Shoe-buckles, a Shirt, a Stock, a Silver Stock- buckle, and 4 1/2d. in Money, May 30.
Gordon (the alleged robber) was acquitted of the charge of robbing Seraphina. Seraphina herself was not on trial - nor was she ever brought to trial for anything afterwards as a result of losing her prosecution.
To set the context: Masquerades flourished in London from the 1720s onward, and took place in assembly rooms, theatres, brothels, public gardens, and molly houses. The commercial masquerades were quasi-carnivals first organized by the impresario John James Heidegger at the Haymarket Theatre from 1717 onwards. His "Midnight Masquerades" were tremendously successful, and drew 800 people a week. They provided many people with the opportunity to explore fetishism and transvestism.
Men disguised themselves as witches, bawds, nursing maids and shepherdesses, while women dressed as hussars, sailors, cardinals and boys from Mozart's operas. In the early days of the fashion, Richard Steele went to one where a parson called him a pretty fellow and tried to pick him up, and Horace Walpole passed for an old woman at a masquerade in 1742.
The opportunities for illicit assignations provoked a host of anti-masquerade satires, and many tracts were mainly devoted to attacking the mollies who attended them, allegedly imitating infamous homosexual cross-dressers such as Sporus, Caligula, and Heliogabalus.
Molly houses - pubs and clubs where gay men met, especially on Sunday nights - were very popular in the 1720s in London. On special "Festival Nights" many of the men would wear drag, and sing and dance together, and engage in camp behaviour.
James Dalton the highwaymay was a witness to molly Festival Nights, which he described in his dying confession published just before he was hanged in 1728, and he briefly mentions John Cooper (Princess Seraphina), who at that time Dalton implied was a butcher. So Seraphina was "on the drag scene" for at least four years before the trial at which she comes dramatically to public notice.
Source: excerpts from: Rictor Norton (Ed.), "Princess Seraphina, 1732", Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook. 2
See also our book "Old Bailey Proceedings" in the Library.
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